Steamy River

A few days ago I mentioned a video of "The River" from Glastonbury in which Bruce Springsteen literally has steam rising up off of him. Here it is, at least for now (the BBC's been taking these down as they find them, but this one's been up for a little while so maybe it'll stay). I've never seen anything quite like this. It starts getting steamy (literally!) just before the two-minute mark.


* * * * *
For those watching Wimbledon -- I'm so glad I have tomorrow as a holiday, because the Match of the Andys (Andies?) -- Roddick vs. Murray -- should be awfully entertaining. And I'm sure Roger Federer, who's bound to have a much easier time dismissing his semi-final opponent (Tommy Hass), would love to see them spend five long sets demolishing one another.

* * * * *

Separated At Birth?

Sugarland musician Kristian Bush...


Poet/editor Tim Green...


Tim? You got a cowboy hat hiding around there somewhere? Because it's kind of uncanny. ;)

* * * * *

Happy Fourth, y'all. Be careful if you're playing with fire this weekend.

New kids & cheap books

Quick notes:

• Look who's blogging now! A couple of my favorite poets have recently joined the (I know this isn't a word) blogosphere: D.A. Powell and Patricia Fargnoli. Drop by and welcome them.
• The University of Pittsburgh Press is having a humongous Summer Poetry Sale until August 1. Lots of great stuff for half price. Because you can never have too many books, right? (sigh)

I know. I know.

Seems like every post I make starts off with an apology. I'm going to stop doing that & just accept that these days I don't seem to have much to blog about, or much inclination. I'm still reading most of you at least occasionally. Not quite ready to declare myself on an official hiatus, not just yet.

Today I spent, no joke, about ten hours tampering with manuscripts -- both the Firstborn and the New Kid. I rejiggered the Firstborn somewhat: pulled out a good handful of poems and shook up the sections, which now number 4 instead of 5. The New Kid is still taking up more space than it oughta, but it's down below 100 pages now at least, which is a pretty nifty feat considering the very first draft clocked in at just over 140. (I know! Crazy. This thing is gonna have more viable outtakes than Springsteen's The River album.)

I'm still working on tightening up the New Kid. But, I'd be very happy to get suggestions for presses that might consider a strongly thematic poetry manuscript of almost 100 pages.

The two mss. are so different it's unreal. I definitely feel that they are both "my voice," whatever that means, and they certainly have some overarching themes/obsessions in common (I'm almost afraid to run either of them through a tag-cloud machine because I'm scared to see how big the word "light" would be), but there are very, very few -- if any -- poems that could conceivably be swapped from one into the other. #1 is your typical first book, where I'd written poems one by one over several years & have played puzzle pieces with them, fitting them together to see how they interact with one another. It does have an emotional/thematic arc, or a couple of them, and I do think it hangs together as a ms. But #2 clearly has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and almost all of the poems in it were written knowing that they were going to be part of an extended story. In fact some of the poems in #2 may not even make a lot of sense outside the context of the collection.

It was interesting today, going back to the Firstborn after having spent so much of my time & energy on the New Kid recently; despite their differences I'd definitely gained a few insights that helped me tighten up the Firstborn. So, that's good.

What is the New Kid about? Well, I've got snippets from various places incorporated throughout the thing, and this one sums up a good bit of it:

"On stage your exhilaration is in direct proportion to the void you're dancing over."
--Bruce Springsteen, Super Bowl Journal (February 2009)

Anyone else out there have the experience of working on two different collections simultaneously? I never thought I'd find myself in this position, for sure. It's interesting.

I do have two readers lined up for the New Kid, and one for the revised Firstborn. I don't know whether or not I want to go out looking for more, but if anyone's dying to cast an evaluative eye on one of 'em, feel free to backchannel me.

I've had a few other things eating my brain over the past few weeks, besides poetry. I've vacillated about whether or not I wanted to mention anything about this in such a public place, and I may come back later & edit this post -- but, my mom has just started radiation treatments for a wee dab of breast cancer. All the doctors are extremely optimistic, and there's every reason to believe that after a little radiation she'll be able to put this thing completely behind her. But it has, understandably I think, thrown me for a bit of a loop. So there's that to contend with. Among other things.

Well, this has certainly been a self-involved post. I was going to leave you with a really cool video to make up for that a bit, but it's been taken down from YouTube "due to a copyright claim by British Broadcasting Corporation." Dang. It was Springsteen singing "The River" at the Glastonbury festival in the UK a couple days ago; a decent performance of one of his best songs, but what was really cool about it was that steam was visibly rising off of his body. He sweats a lot when he's onstage, and apparently it was chilly & damp at Glastonbury (chilly & damp in that part of the world? nooooo!) which caused the striking visual effect. I mean, I've seen racehorses steaming after a workout, but never rockstars. It's an image I would love to steal for my rock-related manuscript, but nobody would believe it! You'll just have to take my word for it, I guess. It was just a cool, cool video, with the steam and the humongous crowd and the giant flags & banners everywhere. Maybe they'll release it on DVD or something. One can only hope. I'd buy it.

Peeking out from under

Sorry I haven't been around. I'm way behind on email as well, so if I owe you one, please be patient & accept my apologies... I've had a lot going on, to be honest, some of which won't see the light of this blog, some of which will.

What I've been doing

Well, partly, I've now got a working draft of my second (!) book manuscript. (The firstborn is out there in the world, visiting editors and trying to make nice. Imagine it like some ever so slightly questionable hippie hitchhiking and couch-surfing, hoping somebody will ask it to just move in...) I was actually up until ahem-ahem-A.M. one night last week pulling together the initial draft, from which I've since pulled out a bunch of poems and added a couple of new ones. This one has been a very different experience from my first ms., in that this has consciously been A Project almost from the beginning, just over a year ago. I won't say that makes it better or worse than the firstborn, just different. I'm at the dangerous stage right now of being a little bit in love with the thing. I need to get over that before I start giving it to readers (got the first one lined up).

Now that this ms. has gone from being a disorganized pile of poems to being A Thing, I may be in a better position to go back to the firstborn and revisit it; I haven't looked closely at it for a few months. They're very different projects, but maybe I've learned a few things. I actually want to write at more length about the differences between the two, though maybe talking too much about a manuscript before it gets accepted anywhere might jinx it.

Readings

The Indiana University Writers' Conference is going on this week. As always, the evening readings by conference faculty are open to the public. I can't make most of them this week due to work & other commitments, but I did get to see Aracelis Girmay and Manuel Munoz the other night. I heard Aracelis Girmay last year at the Indiana Review "funk reading" and really liked her work, so I was glad to see her again; she read a lot of new work that was just phenomenal. (Seriously, there was a poem involving a green dress which alone was worth the price of admission -- well, the reading was free, but if there'd been an admission price, this poem would've been worth it. It got spontaneous mid-reading applause, too, which is always nice.) I enjoyed Manuel Munoz as well; fiction readings often leave me a bit cold, especially when the writer races through paragraphs & pages like they were being paid by the word & need to get in as many as possible in their allotted time, but he read at just the right pace & had a great reading voice. I'll have to check out his work.

Road Trip

I seem to have planned a quick trip out East in late August (yes, there are concert tickets involved). I haven't yet booked a flight, so I'll throw this out there: if anyone knows of a possible reading venue in or near Boston, MA or Providence, RI on August 20 or 21, drop me a note. If I could sell a few chapbooks, it'd be worth my while to extend the trip by a day or so.

You Know You're Really Truly Middle-Aged...

... when you find yourself reading an article about one of your favorite rockstars, not in High Times or Rolling Stone, but in Arthritis Today.

Seriously.

Drafty...

Here's one of the newest poems from Manuscript #2 (aka The Project That Pretty Much Ate My Brain This Year). The protagonist has been on the road and is well on the way to becoming a successful touring musician, but there turns out to be a price...

(I'll take this down in a day or two)


[gone again, gone again]

Ah, memories...

Springsteen 5-12-09 429
Originally uploaded by imgoingdown_2

Spent some time poking around Flickr tonight and was rewarded by finding one more great shot from the Springsteen show in Chicago last month. You may need to click on the photo to enlarge it. Look just to the left of Bruce, a little lower than his butt (ahem). I'm the chick in the tie-dye t-shirt, singing along for all she's worth.

Damn, that was a great night.

Poem of the week & salsa!

My first writers' group (the one that I started back in, um, 1985 or 1986 -- we meet sporadically and casually these days, but we still have a powerful bond with one another) met yesterday afternoon. We sat around on Barb's back deck in the sunshine, which was lovely. Anyway, we generally bring some kind of munchies to share, and I was in a chips-and-salsa mood so that's what I brought. Except I randomly decided to bring a kind of salsa I'd never tried before: peach-mango! Boy oh boy, is that ever some good stuff. It has that spicy-sweet thing going on that I just love. Very summery and refreshing. I brought home what was left & just finished it off as an after-work snack (I had the late shift on the reference desk tonight so didn't get home until after 9). Yum.

Then I randomly stumbled across a poem I know I'd read before, but not recently. You know how sometimes a poem you've read before will haul off and wallop you upside the head like a whole new revelation? Yeah. That. This is the one that did it to me this time:


The Truth the Dead Know

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

-Anne Sexton


That third stanza! Holy crap. And the fourth one too. I'm generally allergic to drama and excessive intensity in my actual life (not counting whatever happens in the context of a rock show), but boy howdy do I love it in poems.

* * * * *

As I was typing that my computer made its little "you have a new message! go look at it instead of having any kind of actual attention span!" chime. I could tell from the first few words (gmail displays the subject line and the first few words of the message before you open it) that it was a rejection note -- when they're accepting something they usually use your name instead of the generic "Dear Poet" -- but was pleased to note a P.S. mentioning they'd liked one of the poems, which was my own favorite of the batch anyway. I think that's the first time I've ever gotten "ink" on an emailed rejection note; I've gotten emailed rejections that I suspected were the "encouraging" version of the form rejection, but I've never been sure about those. Too bad they didn't actually take any of the poems, but encouragement is encouraging and so I am duly encouraged.

Poem of the week

Just finished reading Ali Liebegott's novel-in-verse The Beautifully Worthless. It gave me lots of ideas about how to structure the project, book, whatever it is that I'm working on currently -- one of my characters has started writing letters, which may or may not show up in the manuscript interspersed with actual poems. (They may also just be background information for me to use myself. Don't know yet. I'm leaning towards including them, though.)

Liebegott's book struck me as a bit uneven, but overall pretty interesting and handled the balance between lyric & narrative pretty well. Here's a bit from it:

Once, I found myself beneath a woman,
her legs straddled my lap, her face bent down
to my turned-up mouth, my turned-up mouth
that was turned like flames following the curve
of gasoline thrown by the arsonist.
I wanted exactly what happened that night
for this woman, to undo the buttons of my shirt
exactly as she did,
it was as if the shirt were my skin,

for months after, I was haunted by buttons
opening and falling like the light plunk of a penny
into a wishing well, there's no way I loved her,
and I know she's never thought about those buttons
and how they felt, like something sacred,
like she was God and I was the dying child coming home.

-Ali Liebegott, from The Beautifully Worthless

Just wondering...

So it's been almost a year since I started sending my first book ms. around, which means that some of the same deadlines are coming around again. The ms. has been tweaked here and there since I started submitting it, but hasn't been significantly restructured -- it's still essentially the same book, though hopefully the tweaks have made it a little stronger.

So... obviously nobody's accepted it yet. Do any of y'all ever send essentially the same ms. to a publisher/reading period/contest for a second time? I know most of them use different judges every year, but if you don't get past the initial readers to become a finalist it doesn't really matter who the judge is anyway. I'm inclined not to resend it to anyplace that rejected it without comment, but haven't decided about the places that at least gave me a nice word or two. My instinct is not to resend it even there until it's been significantly restructured, but... what do you guys think? Seriously looking for advice here.

Thanks!

Monkey see...

So this is my first attempt at making a video, using the bitty camera on my bitty new netbook. Not sure how crazy I am about it, and the video quality leaves something to be desired, but I'll put it up at least for now. This is a "rainy morning in Provincetown" poem -- I wrote the first draft sitting in the Adams Pharmacy looking out at cranky wet tourists walking by, then moved over to the Provincetown Public Library and worked on it for a while, then went back over to the Fine Arts Work Center and typed it up & printed it out & took it in to my workshop that afternoon. It was a good day.

Enjoy!

Tweet!

The new issue of OCHO, featuring poets who Twitter, is up! Collin Kelley & Didi Menendez did a great (and fast!) job putting this together. There's a wide range of voices and you're sure to find something you like in this one, whatever your taste. (Maybe you'll even like mine, a kinda weird thing called "Verge" -- you tell me what it's about 'cause I'm still not sure.)

Also, in just over an hour, I will be forty-eight years old. That's a big number.

Drafty in here

Of course I am disappointed, though not exactly surprised, by today's California Supreme Court ruling. I do believe there is momentum in the right direction... baby steps, baby steps. Have faith and keep fighting.

Meanwhile, just to assert that my little join-the-circus road trips really do spawn something other than long rambling blog posts, here's a rough draft from today. I'll take it down in a day or so. It's definitely rough, but so much fun to recall a moment and turn around & put myself in the other person's shoes. Er, boots.


[gone again]

Road notes from the E Street Nation: Part 2 - The Beat, The Beat, The Beat

No, I haven't run away and joined the circus (or a rock & roll band... same difference). Still here.

I have been restless and impatient ever since returning home from my oh-so-short road trip a couple weeks ago, feeling centered only when listening to music, bashing away at my guitar, or writing. I feel like something's come unplugged.

Rock concerts -- at least the ones I go to and love -- give the audience full permission to express and enjoy a couple of things that are, intentionally or not, less than abundant in my life: unbridled romanticism (from"the screen door slams, Mary's dress sways / Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays..." all the way to "big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams / meet me in a land of hope and dreams") and unfiltered sexuality (cue up any throbbing bass line, any drumbeat shuddering through the air and into each and every body in the room, any scorching guitar solo). Hell, just immersing yourself in -- giving yourself over to -- music that's being created by other human beings to the extent that your body moves, almost involuntarily, with what those other humans' hands are doing... that's almost frighteningly sexual in and of itself. Rock music isn't sexual because of its lyrics, but because of its pure, immersive physicality, and the expectation of surrender. So... yeah.

Strong stuff for a middle-aged hermit. No wonder I'm ready to run off and join the circus, huh?

You know, if I had my life to live over again, the one big thing I would do differently is: I would push myself harder with my own music, make myself learn to sing even if it's emotionally challenging (which it is, for me, for some reason -- more than physically or technically challenging -- singing in front of people feels like standing there naked), not put down the guitar just because I'm busy doing other things. Because as much as my fangirlcelebritystalking ways are exactly that -- at the heart of it, it is much more that I long to be a part of the larger thing that is the music itself. I would much, much rather be someone's lyricist or even background singer (yeah right) than their groupie. Much as I get all fangirly about the musicians I love, I don't give much of a shit about celebrity itself -- if you put me in a room with, say, Tom Hanks or some other megasuperstar and a minor-league musician I happen to love, it'd be the musician I'd get all tongue-tied talking to. Because they are the emissaries of the Music, corny as that sounds.

(Which is how it happens that a middle-aged doofy poet gets all swoony over being given a little plastic guitar pick by a middle-aged doofy rockstar. Trust me, I know how silly this all is, but it's truly in service to something larger. And knowing that, my friends, is part of what makes it different now -- and deeper -- than what it was like seeing this same band thirty years ago, when it was just wild and fun. All the deeper stuff was there then, but I didn't know it yet, at least not with the brain part of my brain.)

At my age (forty-eight in a few short days!) I'm obviously not about to run away and join the circus. I know it, you know it, my colleagues at work know it, my cats know it most of all. I'm too fond of having health insurance and of sleeping in my own bed at night. Certainly "Chasing Angels," the manuscript I'm working on these days, is in part my stab at living vicariously through my characters, imagining the good and the bad of being a full-time touring musician. If I can get the thing written and (cross fingers) published, it will certainly serve in part as a very public love letter to the music and the people who create it.

It's all my dad's fault, really. He was a musician and I grew up in a house full of music -- my dad's band occasionally practiced in our living room (when they couldn't use the drummer's basement for whatever reason) and music was just a part of the air I breathed. And then when I was 12 years old he got his doctorate, got a faculty position, packed us up and moved us to Indiana, and never made an effort to find himself a musicians' community or people to play with, and he pretty much gave up playing. Which is just tremendously heartbreaking to me, even now. He always loved music and listened to it, but he was never a part of it in the same way again.

What would it be like to reach middle age without having given up on your greatest, craziest dreams?

Getting a little taste of that, even from a distance, is another reason I love Springsteen/E Street Band concerts. In part it's what they're selling us -- the dream, the romantic sense of belief. I know that. It's a circus, it's a show; they're performers, playing their parts. But also, there's something there that's much too real to be just an act, just entertainment. You watch Bruce on that stage with every cell in his body committed to what he's doing (living the dream he's been working on since he was a kid, really) and as you sing along and raise your arms in the air and become a part of it, you can't help but believe the message on some level. "Dreams will not be thwarted / Faith will be rewarded."

Late in the show on a Saturday night (Milwaukee, 2008)...
Bruce: "Don't you [people in the audience] gotta be in church tomorrow?"
Steve [Van Zandt, guitarist]: "We're in church."
Bruce: "What?"
Steve: "We're in church now."

Religious experience? Sure, maybe. I really don't care what you call it. All I know is, when I go to these concerts, I become a part of something much, much larger than myself. Call it Music, call it God, call it twenty thousand people getting sweaty together in a very large room. Call it a little corner of joy and hope and letting your whole body be alive. Call it whatever you want... all I know is, I want more.

Interlude: Radio Nowhere

Still scratching my head trying to put some words together about some of what the recent Springsteen shows meant to me. Maybe it won't happen. Maybe it will.

Meanwhile, here's part of Radio Nowhere (from a couple of weeks before "my" shows) so you can see I wasn't kidding about Mister Holy Crap Jay Weinberg. Not that a little YouTube video can capture half of what it's like when you feel that bass drum in your chest and legs... but maybe you'll get a little of the idea. (I love how he's singing along, too! He's just SO into it, it's unreal.)

Road Notes from the E Street Nation: Part 1 - The Thunder

So last week I spent a few days with my mom in northern Indiana, then drove to Chicago, flew to St. Paul, flew back to Chicago, and drove back home. All for the love of rock & roll. It wasn’t quite as epic as last summer’s road trip, but it sure did have its moments.

One thing I was looking forward to was the new kid on the drums. Max Weinberg, who’s been the E Street Band drummer since the mid-seventies, has a “day job” as bandleader for the Conan O’Brien show – and with Conan taking over Leno’s timeslot, Max won’t be able to miss the first few weeks. It was revealed a few months ago that Max’s 18 year old son, Jay Weinberg, would be sitting in for at least some of the European shows that Max won’t be able to make – and Jay’s been warming up by playing at least portions of most of the recent U.S. shows (though he didn’t make an appearance at the Denver show I went to). Now, Jay’s usual gig is with a metal band, and did I mention that he’s 18? Just… yeah. I have to admit that my first reaction was “An 18-year-old metalhead? Has Bruce Springsteen lost his freakin’ mind??” But I’d been hearing good reports from the shows Jay had played so far, and I was dying of curiosity to see for myself.

The St. Paul show opened with “Badlands” and Jay was on the riser – and holy crap, people! The kid’s impressive! “Radio Nowhere” is his real showpiece – long black hair flying, bringing the thunder like nobody’s business. I immediately became a convert. True, he doesn’t have the precision, the consistency, or the depth of repertoire that his father has. Nor can he read Bruce’s mind quite the way his father can after so many years. But let me tell you, the kid makes up for it with his passion, enthusiasm, power, and joy. He is SO much fun to watch. At about the halfway point of the show Max took over, and the changeover was just incredibly sweet – both Bruce and Max visibly busting with pride, giving Jay hugs and high-fives, the audience ROARING as Jay took a bow. (And for the rest of the show Max played, if anything, even harder & better than usual, & his "usual" is damned amazing -- a little challenge from the younger generation never hurts, I guess!)

   [photo from backstreets.com]
Understand: the E Street Nation is very, very protective of its little band. We’re incredibly lucky in that most of the guys in the band are the same ones many of us fell in love with thirty-plus years ago; and we don’t much care for change, or for new faces. So to see the audience embracing the “new kid” was sweet indeed. Does it help that he’s “family”? Sure. I wouldn’t deny that. There are lots of competent, even brilliant, drummers (my hometown guy Kenny Aronoff comes to mind) who could have stepped in to get the job done. But they would have just been hired hands. So the blood connection does make a difference. That said, Jay had to win us over on his own – it wasn’t a gimme. And he did so with gusto.

A little known fact about the younger Mr. Weinberg: “Jay” is actually his middle name. The whole show I found myself calling him by his full name, which is HOLY CRAP JAY WEINBERG. I heard more than a couple of other folks using his real first name as well. Seriously!

Anyway, so St. Paul was a pretty good show. But Chicago’s what I really want to talk about. See, I had general admission tickets both nights. The way they work GA is this: you show up at the venue between 2 and 5:00 on the day of the show with your ticket in hand, and you get a wristband. The wristband has a number on it. Around 5:00 they start getting people lined up in numerical order. Once people are sort of lined up they let you know how many wristbands have been given out (around 1200 in St. Paul and a little less than that in Chicago), and they let you know how many they will be allowing into the “pit,” which is the partitioned-off section right in front of the stage. (600 in St. Paul, 550 in Chicago – it varies by venue.) They draw a “random” number, and the person whose wristband matches that number gets to be first in line. It generally works more or less okay, and keeps people from sitting in line in front of the venue all night like in the bad old days.

ANYWAY. In St. Paul, I didn’t get into the pit, and in fact I had a good couple hundred people ahead of me going into the main GA area, so I had quite a few people in front of me – at 5 foot 1 this is an issue! – but honestly I still enjoyed it more than I would have from a seat. The energy is higher on the floor, and those of us who like to stand up and dance and shout and sing the whole show don’t have somebody behind them begging them to please sit down. But still… you want that magic number, you want to be close. In Chicago, my wristband was #782. I stood in line, surrounded by strangers, my heart pounding as they drew……… #747. I was in!! Not only that, but I was WAY in… I knew at that point that I’d either be in the very front or at most I’d have maybe one person between me and the stage. Oh, the glee! Oh, the anticipation! Oh, the people high-fiving and texting their friends! 20,000 people in the United Center and we’re going to be in front of all of ‘em!

We were ushered into the arena a good couple hours before the show, so most of us used the time to sit on the floor and relax while we could. Some people brought in food and enjoyed their dinner. Lots of chatting, reminiscing about shows past, getting to know your neighbors. I always meet really great folks at these shows, and St. Paul & Chicago were no exception. A few times I stood up to stretch and just gazed at the stage… right… THERE… within touching distance. The stage is like an altar to me, a sacred thing, set with the implements of magic: guitars, microphones, Soozie Tyrell’s violins, Roy Bittan’s white piano. There’s a comfort in seeing water and setlists set out for the band members a few minutes before showtime, in the ritual of the last-minute soundcheck. I’ve never been a performing musician, but looking at that stage just feels like home to me. It’s funny.

And then that magic, magic moment when the lights go down. The crowd erupts and under cover of darkness, one by one, the musicians slip onto the stage. And the lights blaze up and the band crashes into “Badlands” and I’m out of my mind with giddy delight. It’s funny, being six feet from the musicians – the show is BIG: grand gestures, full voices, everything devoted to pushing the songs’ energy all the way up into the rafters. Being so close to that is like chatting with someone who’s in full stage makeup – it’s TOO vivid, too big, too MUCH almost. It takes a little getting used to. (Oh, but I can get used to it… oh boy can I ever.)

It’s a different show, being close enough to actually interact with the band a little. Close enough to get hit with a flying drop of sweat (Bruce sweats like a horse and he plays that guitar pretty hard… it’s actually fairly unsanitary up front *grin*). I was, in an uncharacteristically brilliant move, wearing my favorite tie-dye “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” t-shirt, and as luck would have it, I was planted squarely in front of Little Steven himself. It was a fun moment when he noticed the shirt and gave me a big smile. (And then at the end of the show, he came over in my direction and handed me a guitar pick – someone else was reaching for it and he was very careful to make sure it got into MY grubby little hands. Swoon!)

I actually find, when I’m up close, that I only end up watching Bruce about half the time – even though he’s pretty much the greatest and most charismatic performer in the history of rock & roll. I just love watching all the other band members as they rally round to support his vision – the little interactions between them, the scrambling when Bruce changes up the setlist on the fly, the dedication and love that every one of them puts into the music. It’s a remarkable band, made up of (from everything I have heard from people who know or have met them) remarkable people. Yes, it is Bruce’s vision and commitment (and NOBODY, nowhere, conveys pure commitment in their performance like Bruce Springsteen does) that’s out front leading the way, but the E Street Band is a magnificent machine: the sheer virtuosity of Nils Lofgren and Roy Bittan; the mighty thunder of Max Weinberg; the heart and soul and rock&roll conviction of Little Steven; the reliable foundation of Garry Tallent’s criminally underrated bass playing; the "biggest man you've ever seen," mountain of love, Clarence Clemons… it’s like a bumblebee, this band: with that many strong-minded individuals on stage, it should be physically impossible for it to fly -- but fly it does. Oh baby… fly it does.

[photo taken with my crappy cellphone camera. that's Bruce up there standing on the piano.]

Next up: Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll (except not so much with the drugs part).

For the moment

Still working on my thoughts about the St. Paul and Chicago Springsteen concerts. I know, too much buildup, the post will never measure up! Ah well. To tide you over, here's a little drafty draft from today. This is from my "Chasing Angels" series and it's in the voice of the longtime, loyal fan who's just spent a little time following the band she loves from town to town. Gee... where would I have gotten THAT idea, hmmm? ;)


[gone]

diode

I'm working on a proper post about my two-night stand in the E Street Nation... and actually right now I am listening to an, er, audience-sourced recording of the Chicago show, reliving one of my favorite nights of my life. These concerts mean so much more to me than just the music. Still working on finding the words.

Meanwhile, if you want some words, you can go check out the new issue of diode! I am very pleased to have three poems in it. Haven't had the time yet to read the rest of the issue closely, but it looks like some hot stuff overall. It's a consistently interesting journal. Hope y'all enjoy it...

spring vacation in the E Street Nation

I will definitely make a better post in the near future. But for now, I leave you with this picture that someone sitting in a section behind the stage snapped at the Chicago Springsteen show. (You probably have to click on the picture to see the whole thing. And yes, it's taken from behind the stage; Bruce and Steve were interacting with the drummer so that's why they have their backs turned to most of the audience.)

Look in the very front row, towards the left... short woman wearing a tie-dye t-shirt that's kinda blue at the top... c'est moi.

I'm not kidding. At the Chicago show, I was in the very, very, very front. To say that I was deliriously happy would be an understatement.

(The shirt I was wearing, incidentally, was my Little Steven's Underground Garage shirt. And Little Steven did indeed notice and appreciate that fact. He smiled at me a bunch of times and at the end he came over and put a guitar pick into my happy little hands. Niiiiiiice.) (Yes, he was also Silvio on the Sopranos, for those who follow tv more closely than they follow music. But he belonged to the E Street Band first, darnit!)

Anyway, it was a bit of a whirlwind trip, and I'm long overdue for sleep, so I will post more tomorrow or so. And I'm sure I owe some emails, Twitter/Facebook stuff, etc. and I haven't read any blogs in days. I'll catch up eventually, right?

Good intentions

I know, I've been a very poor blogger lately. I'd say it was just that I don't seem to have much of anything very interesting to say, but when has that ever stopped me (or anyone on the internet for that matter)?

I'm going to try to be better. Really. (Hi Eduardo.)

At the moment, I have a monster to-do list staring me in the face; I'm headed out of town on Friday and it's crazy how much I have to do before then. And a good part of this evening was a lost cause thanks to a combination of sheer slothfulness and a headache (my sinuses apparently do not approve of the weather tonight).

My crazy-productive writing spurt seems to have tapered off, which might be a good thing actually. After I finish running around the Midwest for a few days, I hope to take some time and sit down with a bunch of the poems I've drafted over the past few months and pound on them a bit and revise the things. And I want to see how close I am to having a draft of the full "Chasing Angels" manuscript. The other day I sat down and asked my three main characters (the singer, the guitarist, and the devoted fan) a question -- yes, I'm doing that fictiony thing of writing up character studies, just for my own benefit, to understand them better. I may end up mining these sketches for poem bits, or I may not, but I think I'm going to do more of them. The question I asked them this time was: What scares you? The funny thing is, I know good and well what scares all three of them, and as I wrote their answers, none of them were completely honest. Typical. ;) Next question I want to ask them is: What would you risk for someone or something that you love? Something tells me they won't give me the whole truth about that one, either.

The other writing project on my plate is, of course, the first book manuscript -- the one I banged together on my retreat in June of last year and have been sending around to various presses and contests. Twenty-nine presses and contests so far, to be exact. I've decided that it goes out to one more, just to make it an even thirty, in the next month or so -- and then I may pull back a bit on this one. If nobody names it as at least a finalist, out of thirty attempts, I think that's a sign that I should do a pretty extensive revision. I skimmed through it (and tweaked it here & there, of course) as I was getting it ready to go out to the last little handful of places, and funny enough, I still pretty much like it and believe in the thing. But I may well be able to make it better. Maybe I can manage to go away somewhere for a long weekend this summer and dive back into it then.

So, one more publisher or contest. I'm open to recommendations! :)

Spring fever

First off, run over and congratulate Diane K. Martin, who has some terrific and long-awaited great news!

I've been busy, and not blogging. Poetry stuff, music stuff, wishing there were more hours in every day stuff.

Got a grant application submitted which, if I get it, will send me to AWP next year. Fingers crossed. And if nothing else, putting the application together was a worthwhile experience -- a chance to step back and look at the trajectory of my work and what I've been doing with it. I hadn't updated my artistic resume in a while and it was nice to realize that I really did have some things to add to it. Speaking of which, I promised my manuscript I would send it out to two more places (maybe three) this month and then if it doesn't get picked as at least a finalist, we're talking major revision. Er, "this month" means I don't have a lot of time left, doesn't it? Guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow evening.

Getting so much happiness & energy from music lately. I've decided that in addition to the Bruce Springsteen show in Chicago next month, I'm also going to see him in St. Paul the night before. I will be in St. Paul for less than 24 hours, which seems a little crazy, but I felt my face bust into a giant grin when I got my ticket in today's mail, when I opened up the envelope and carefully extracted that precious little piece of paper. And that told me I made the right choice when I decided to go. If I could be even half as present with my work as Springsteen is with his, half as committed, I'd get a whole lot more work done. I almost think of him as one of my writing teachers. Weird, huh?

This past Friday night I went to Indianapolis to see some of my other musical heroes, the Indigo Girls. I hadn't seen them in a few years, and that's a few years too long. It was a general-admission, standing-room show in a room the size of a large high school gym, and I was incredibly fortunate & ended up standing front and center. I mean, I was so close that I was even able to get some (semi-surreptitious) halfway decent pictures with my cruddy little no-megapixel cellphone camera. I went by myself, but unexpectedly met up with someone I knew a bit from online, and had a great time hanging with her and the friends she'd come with. And, you know, I really need to remember how much music feeds my spirit. Especially when I go to a show where I'm standing, putting my arms in the air, singing along -- not hunched over in a seat protecting my heart. There's a communal experience that happens at some shows -- Springsteen, Indigos -- almost a tribal thing. There's nothing else like it, and it feeds me deeply.

Finally, I squoze out two lines of a villanelle the other day. If I actually finish it and make a proper villanelle, you can be assured that hell has frozen over, which probably means all the swine flu viruses will be frozen to death. In which case I had better get cracking.

Small pond

This week two different people, neither of whom I knew, recognized me because of poetry stuff. One had seen me at the annual Five Women Poets readings (she knows someone else in the group and comes to our readings often). The other was a cashier in a shop who took my debit card, recognized my name, and remembered hearing me on the radio.

Does that ever stop feeling weird?

In other news, it's full-on spring and everything is busting into blossom. I love this time of year. Bloomington has a ridiculous number of flowering trees and we're just at that stage where the earliest ones are starting to lose their bloom, petals drifting through the air like clouds of snow. The redbuds are intense in their pink/magenta/fuchsia/undefinable color, bright as a neon sign. DC may have its cherry trees but we have our Bradford pears, flowering plums, redbuds, dogwoods, magnolias, tulip trees, forsythia, and a bunch of other stuff I don't know the names of. It's really fairly spectacular.

A few days ago (actually, on the plane back from Denver, right after we skidded down onto the Indianapolis tarmac) I finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. It got a lot of hype when it came out a few years ago, and I resisted reading it for that reason, but people, the hype is justified. This is one of those books that fucks you up while you're reading it (and that's a good thing). It pulls you into a world and a language that makes your heart hurt but that you never want to leave. I'd give a lot to be able to write like that.

Finally, sending out good thoughts to the terrific poet, blogger, and all-around good guy Brent Goodman. In case you hadn't heard, he had a heart attack a few days ago and is hanging out in the cardiac ward for a little while. And what's really amazing is he's still writing and posting a poem every day. Now that's heart.